Law and the Party in China. Ideology and Organisation
genocide against Azeris by Armenians’ in today’s official Azerbaijani propaganda (p. 134). One of the problematic elements in Nested Nationalism is the description of the escalation of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. Goff writes that in November 1987, ‘the first train arrived in Baku carrying Azeris fleeing interethnic violence in Armenia’ (p. 221) without providing any reference. The problem with this assertion is that there was no interethnic violence in Armenia at the height of Gorbachev’s perestroika. Narratives that ethnic Azeris were forced out of Armenia date from the early 1990s, years after the conflict started in February 1988. The book is richly documented, using both oral history—with some 120 interviews—and archival material. Carrying out academic research in Azerbaijan comes with numerous difficulties, as the author narrates how in one instance an ‘archive director denounced me as a separatist in front of archival staff’ and, elsewhere, how ‘it was not possible for me to order files about Armenians while conducting research in Azerbaijani archives’ (p. 10).